I am enjoying my first weeks of using the Tomato Firmware. I purchased a Linksys WRT54GL wireless router because of its admirable support for third-party firmware like Tomato, which replaces the traditional Linksys setup screens with an alterative system with many more configuration options. I can also connect directly to Tomato over SSH and use it as a very small Linux system! This opens endless possibilities for writing fancy firewall rules and running small embedded applications right at the border of my home network.

The Tomato firmware uses a small DNS server named dnsmasq to answer the steady stream of domain name requests from my home computers. It converts domain names that I type, like rhodesmill.org or google.com, into the low-level IP addresses with which computers identify each other.

But I also like using hostnames for the machines sitting right in my home, even though they do not have “real names” out on the Internet. I recommend placing local hostnames inside of a top-level domain that is local to your own network. Choose a suffix that differs from all of the top-level domains that exist out on the Internet — avoid .com, .net, or .uk, for example, in favor of something like .home or .myhouse instead. How, I wondered, could I add extra host names to dnsmasq?

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